Financial Crisis Panel Names Names

Posted on Jan 27, 2011

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is among those blamed by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission for the economic collapse.

Chairman Phil Angelides and the five other Democrats on the 10-person Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission have released their devastating report, which blames former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan, former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, current Treasury boss and former New York Fed Chair Timothy Geithner and the financial gimmick marketers of Goldman Sachs, among others, for the economic meltdown.

Another wasted opportunity. However it’s looking more and more that the goal of the
right is to create a totalitarian state in America. One that preserves the wealth and power
of the right, at the expense of the people. They are destroying this country one life at a
time. The political process is no longer able to address the criminality of the financial
industry. The political class is now an entrenched part of it. We won’t have a nation of
starving disposed people who are armed to the teeth. They know where wall street is.

The report is clearly a partisan hackjob. It was
endorsed exactly on party lines and makes the
counterfactual claim that the crisis could have been
anticipated (in a precise sense, rather than the
general sense that we can predict that capitalism
will always lead to disastrous results) despite the
obvious fact that it wasn’t. All said, it seeks to
provide reassurance through the fairy tale that the
problems of capitalism were caused by a few people
making dumb mistakes (rather than being systemic
faults) and that it’ll never happen again now that
the wise Democrats are watching over us (rather than
admitting that they have no clue how to fix the
current crisis, let alone prevent the next one).

No doubt it will be used by kneejerk Democrats to
demonize the few individuals named within, but
hopefully it will be ignored by serious leftists.

However, the report did soften the blow, saying: “In making these
observations, we deeply respect and appreciate the efforts made by Secretary
Paulson, Chairman Bernanke, and Timothy Geithner… and so many others who
labored to stabilise our financial system and our economy in the most chaotic
and challenging of circumstances.”

How conciliatory, considering how complicit they all are. How lucky for them,
the times in which they live…

Michel Foucault describes in detail the evolution of punishment from
hanging, drawing and quartering of medieval times to the modern systems of
fines and prisons. He sees a trend in criminal punishment from vengeance by
the King to a more practical, utilitarian concern for deterrence and
rehabilitation.

Q: Should one expect they’ll be deterred or that they’ve been rehabilitated? If not, why not ask: Is hanging, drawing and
quartering ‘off the table’?